


Echoes in the Distance

by alamorn



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age II
Genre: Amnesia, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-15
Updated: 2018-07-15
Packaged: 2019-06-10 23:34:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 6,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15302502
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/alamorn/pseuds/alamorn
Summary: It took three years, but Hawke escaped the Fade. Or at least her body did.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FeoplePeel](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FeoplePeel/gifts).



Varric found her before Leliana did, which he counted as a stroke of luck. He liked Leliana well enough, but this was Hawke, and Hawke was different, and Leliana didn’t understand that. Or, well, she’d told him that feelings didn’t matter, and a few other things that made him so angry he had to go stand on the parapets of Skyhold for a little while and pretend that it was the Gallows. It didn’t work, really. The smell was all wrong — fresh air and horse dung, rather than the rank piss and blood smell that had seeped into the stones of the Gallows. That had been a while ago, before the Inquisition disbanded and he became Viscount, but he was still angry about it. 

Anyway, he got a letter from his editor, who was not only the most ruthless editor in the world — she would leave not an adverb unchopped, or a comma unqueried — but also one of the most integral parts of his spy network. The letter said a lot of things, mostly about the foolishness of titling a book _All This Shit is Weird_ , but worked into the tirade was the name of a village.

Just a village was opaque, even for her, so he asked Isabela to take a look. Isabela refused to be part of his spy network proper — “We’re _friends_ , Varric,” she said every time he asked. “I don’t work for friends.” — but if he asked prettily enough, she’d manage to mosey in the right direction eventually. And besides, he could trust her to take care of herself. Most of his people were competent at staying alive, but competent hadn’t been enough when they were following Hawke around, and Isabela’d been good at it before that. With Fenris following her around, she was as safe as anyone he could think of.

Isabela’s letter came quicker than he expected, and it was shorter, too. “Get here now,” was all it said. That, and a drawing of a bird.

Varric set the letter down very carefully, hands trembling. He smoothed it out across his desk, and glanced from it to the Viscount’s crown where it sat at the edge of the desk, sloppily put aside after his last meeting. _Get here now_ , but how could he?

And how could he not?

“Bran,” he called, thinking furiously.

The Seneschal stepped in a moment later, already looking pinched. Varric wasn’t sure whether Bran had picked something up from his tone, or if he just always looked like that these days. He didn’t care much, either.

“How do you feel about being Viscount for a spell?” he asked.

“No, absolutely not,” Bran said. “You’re not leaving.”

“Not immediately,” Varric said. “I’ll get things put together for you. Don’t worry, you’ll be fine.”

“No,” Bran said again, shaking his head. “No, no, you’re not doing this.”

Varric stood from his desk, stretched out his back, and walked over to Bran, clapping him companionably on the shoulder. “Dear Bran,” he said, “how do you plan to stop me?”

While Bran was making a low whining noise in the back of his throat, Varric strode out of his office and across the Keep, down to the guard-captain’s office. 

“Aveline!” he said. 

Aveline looked at him the way she’d looked at him for years: dubious, and waiting to be won over. “Varric,” she said.

“Want to join me on a trip?” he asked. “See the sights, breathe some fresh air, partake in some dashing heroics?”

“Absolutely not,” she said. “I have a job to do.”

“So do I!” he said. “But I think you’ll like this trip. I heard there’s a treasure at the end.”

He held out the letter with a flourish and Aveline stared, unimpressed, for a long moment before taking it. When she read it, though, she looked up at him with something like hope. “Donnic has been itching for some higher leadership experience,” she said. “I suppose I could let him have some.”

“Why, Aveline!” Varric mimed shock. “Skiving off duty and nepotism in one fell blow? You must be eager.”

“Don’t push your luck, dwarf,” she said, but she was smiling.

 

They gathered up Bethany and Merrill and sent word to Anders and chartered a swift little ship that darted them across the Waking Sea in no time at all. He spent most of the time fielding questions he couldn’t possibly answer from Merrill and keeping an eye on Bethany, making sure she didn’t lean so far over the bowsprit that she fell in the sea.

 

Apparently, Hawke was running an apothecary. In a town this size, Isabela said, mostly what she sold was poisons to keep pests out of fields, potions to make crops grow, and tinctures to encourage or discourage pregnancy.

“She’s not a mage,” he protested, as Isabela ushered him from the ship he’d arrived on to her own, Aveline trodding sturdily behind, Bethany and Merrill surging past. “Why aren’t we going to see her?”

Isabela made a face. “She’s…different. Best for everyone you have warning, and a night to recover.”

Bethany’s head whipped around. “She’s my _sister_.”

Varric stopped in his tracks, and strong as Isabela was, he was still heavier than she could easily move. “Different how? Because I — we _all_ thought she was dead for three years, so I’m pretty damn eager to see her.”

Isabela shifted nervously. “Different. I don’t know, Varric. Just…don’t get your hopes up. Any of you.”

Aveline, who didn’t believe in being coy, said, “Out with it.”

Isabela sighed. “She doesn’t remember anything.”

“Anything about what?” Varric said. “The Fade? The night before? Be specific, Rivaini.”

“About anything,” Isabela said, sounding distant and sad. “Not a thing from before she fell out of the Fade, right in the middle of town. They recognized her, and, by some stroke of luck, she landed in a town filled with kind souls. She has a shop. Apparently,” she continued, staring out at the sea with a look he hadn’t seen on her face in years, “she picked up some magic in the Fade. She runs an apothecary, and calls herself Lee.”

 

Lee had grown her hair out. Just long enough that it curled gently around her jawline. It had a curious softening effect on her face, made her look younger. Or maybe it was the lack of stress that had turned her into a stranger. She held her jaw looser, and her smiles were free and easy, with no hint of anger behind them.

She was a stranger, wearing Hawke’s face. There was nothing he could recognize in the way she held herself, the way she laughed. Abruptly he turned and walked out of the apothecary. Even if she had known him, she wouldn’t have noticed his absence, surrounded as she was by the rest of her old friends.

Even Anders had managed to come, though he wasn’t staying on Isabela’s ship, and Varric wasn’t sure how he’d arrived so quickly. He wasn’t about to ask either, not when Cassandra had a habit of “just dropping by” every so often. The last thing Varric heard as he walked out the door was Anders’ voice, as earnest and intense as ever, saying, “Do you mind if I-?”

He paced the village. It was small enough that he could walk it from end to end in half an hour. The villagers, who had so kindly taken the woman who had been Hawke in and set her up with a shop, did not talk to him. There was a Fade scar on the ground where she’d been spat out. He’d seen enough of them closing rifts with the Inquisitor that the markings were unmistakable. He squatted there for a moment, touching the scar and trying to imagine what it must have been like, falling into a new world, as ignorant and frightened as a babe.

One of the villagers, the blacksmith by the look of his arms, stopped near Varric. Varric stood, wiping his hands off on his pants, trying to think of something to say. His silver tongue seemed to have become lead.

“You’re one of Hawke’s friends, yeah? Here to see Lee?” the blacksmith said, shifting nervously.

“Varric Tethras,” Varric said.

The blacksmith’s eyes widened. “You wrote _Swords and Shields_! My wife loves that serial -- if I brought it to you before you left, would you sign it?”

“Anything for a fan,” Varric said, with his author’s smile. “Do you have an inscription in mind?”

“Oh, anything -- but I shouldn’t be blabbering on about that. Um. Have you spoken to Lee yet?”

“Not yet,” Varric said.

“She’s kind,” the blacksmith said, as stalwart as if Varric had said otherwise. “Doesn’t much match the Champion in your _Tale_ , but she’s kind. We’re happy to have her.”

Varric forced another smile. “I’ll keep it in mind.” Before the blacksmith could say anything else, Varric said, “Excuse me,” and left.

 

She found him by the docks a few hours later. He’d been there for a while, brooding, if he was being unkind with himself, which he was.

She dropped down next to him with some trace of the easy grace he remembered from Lowtown nights drinking on top of Gamlen’s house. “I hear you’re my biographer,” she said. “Know me inside and out.”

He glanced over, and the spark in her lyrium blue eyes was familiar enough that he found himself turning to face her, without even considering it. “Varric Tethras, at your service.”

“Tell me,” she said, “Varric Tethras, erstwhile biographer, how much stock should I put in that pirate’s innuendos?”

“Very little,” he said, feeling a smile slide its way onto his face. “Isabela likes a good story more than the truth.”

She tilted her head. “I would have thought the novelist would be the one to look at for stories.”

“I know the value of one,” he said. “I also know the value of the truth. I’ve been telling quite a bit of that, lately.” He looked her over, from her practical apothecarist’s boots to her stained shirt, to the hair curling around her jaw, the comfortable way she slumped. Comfortable, and friendly, but not familiar. Still a stranger in Hawke’s body. “What truth are you looking for?”

She smiled, wide and honest. “You must have known her well.”

“Who?” he asked, uncomfortably certain he knew.

“Her,” she said, waving a hand. “Hawke. The Champion. The woman I apparently was.”

“You could say that,” he said. 

“What was she like?” Lee asked, looking out over the sea and kicking her feet over the swells that knocked companionably against the dock.

“Hawke...was brilliant,” he said, feeling awkwardly exposed talking about Hawke to her face, if not her mind. “One of the best thieves I’ve ever met. She was funny, and angry, and fiercely protective. She’d do anything for a friend, and quite a bit for an acquaintance, if the story was sad enough. A group tried kidnapping Bethany once. It ended badly for them.” He chuckled, remembering. That had been a satisfying fight. “She went from nothing to the Champion of Kirkwall, and if I hadn’t been there every step of the way I might not have believed it.”

When he looked back to Lee there was a small smile on her face, the type he’d only seen on Hawke when she was looking at her dog. Kitten was back in the Viscount’s keep, overseeing Donnic and the Watch, but Varric regretted leaving her behind suddenly. Maybe the smell of mabari would have drawn Hawke back to herself.

Lee touched her abdomen, where Hawke had once hung from the Arishok’s blade. “I imagine it was not a smooth rise,” she said.

“You’ve got questions about her scars?” he asked. “Lay ‘em on me, I was around for most of them. That one was from the fight that made her Champion, the duel with the Arishok.”

“And this one?” she asked, holding up her arm and using the opposite hand to trace a wide river of pink scar tissue down from her wrist to her elbow.

“We were drinking on the roof of her uncle’s house,” he said, “and she fell off. She caught herself, but she skidded first, lost half her skin on the wall. Bethany refused to heal it for three hours because it was such a stupid accident, but Hawke threatened to bleed on all of her clothes. She meant it, too!”

Lee laughed, eyes crinkling. And then she tilted her head and said, “You said she was funny and angry, but was she happy?” When he didn’t respond, she prodded. “The Champion. Was she happy?”

 

After the failure of brooding at the docks, Varric tried brooding in his cabin on Isabela’s ship. Cabin was a bit of a misnomer — it was about the size of a closet. When he’d pointed that out, Isabela had shrugged. “If you don’t want my lovely, dwarf-sized guest cabin,” she’d said, “I could give you a hammock with the crew.”

Varric had acquiesced to the tiny cabin, but been unable to stop himself from saying, “It was a closet until yesterday, right?”

“Oh, absolutely,” Isabela had said, “there’s a pile of ropes in the corner of _my_ cabin now, I keep tripping over them.”

Anyway. Varric was brooding as best he could in the space and time he had available.

_The Champion. Was she happy?_

He hadn’t known how to answer, or whether it deserved one. Hawke had laughed often, certainly. But happy? But then again, what did happy even mean in Kirkwall? He wouldn’t have known how to answer if Lee asked _him_ if he was happy.

“Ephemeralis,” he told himself. “No one can be happy all the time.” But when had Hawke last been happy at all? 

There was a knock on the door, and then it opened before he could say anything. Merrill peeked her head around the corner. “Hello, Varric,” she said. “May I come in?”

“Of course, Daisy,” he said, moving over on the bed so she could perch next to him.

“I wanted to talk about Hawke — I mean, Lee,” Merrill said, shifting until she was comfortable, one long thigh pressed up against Varric’s. Since it was hot out, he suspected she was nervous, rather than cold, and would eventually work her way up to asking for a hug. “She’s very different, isn’t she? Do you think she named herself after Leandra?”

Varric sighed. He didn’t really want to talk about Hawke. “She says she doesn’t remember anything.”

“Fenris doesn’t remember anything,” Merrill said. “But Hawke seems happier than Fenris did, when we met him.”

“Yeah,” Varric said unhappily. “She does.”

 

He went to see her in her shop again the next day. This time he made it past the door and all the way to the counter, where she was reading a book. _Her_ book, he saw, with a peculiar dread. _The Tale of the Champion_ in all its florid glory.

“Not the author’s best work,” he said casually. “I much prefer _Hard in Hightown_.”

She cast an amused glance up at him. “Funny that Isabela forgot to mention betraying the Champion when she was trying to jog my memory.”

“What _did_ she mention?” he asked.

Lee closed _The Tale_ carefully, with a pretty little bookmark, and slid it under the counter where it would be safe from spills. Then she rested her elbows on the counter and dropped her chin to her laced together fingers. “Oh,” she said, “a few things. Drinking games, battles, the times we fucked. That sort of thing.”

“To be fair to Isabela,” Varric said, “she likes talking about those things with people who _haven’t_ forgotten their entire lives, too.”

“They’re rich topics,” Lee said, a smile curving her lips. “And I’d rather hear about them than the deaths of half my family, or how I failed to keep a city from burning down.” 

“None of that was your fault,” Varric said.

“Did you convince her of that?”

_The Champion. Was she happy?_

“No,” Varric said. “No, Hawke thought she needed to carry the weight of the world all by herself.”

Lee tilted her head. It was a habit of hers, and one that she used where Hawke would have stuck out her jaw. The difference made him uncomfortable, almost angry. Her face was open and unguarded, which made him feel guilty for being angry. “I feel sorry for her. And you.”

“Why me?” Varric asked, amused.

“Well,” Lee said, “you loved her.”

She couldn’t have surprised him more if she’d thrown one of her poisons in his face. He laughed uncomfortably. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“Sorry, did I misunderstand?” She tapped her fingers nervously. “I thought…the way you wrote about her, and how you seemed with me. I…apologize.”

He let himself think before he spoke. It was a habit he’d gotten into as Viscount, and one he planned to unlearn as soon as he stopped being Viscount, whenever that blessed day came. “Lee, you seem like a sweet woman, but you’re not Hawke, and you only know the story you’ve been told.”

“I can read between the lines.”

“The _lines_ ,” he said, “that I wrote. The implications that I placed.”

“And what did it benefit Hawke for people to think you loved her?” Lee said, a challenge sparking in her eye. Her tone was still soft, but her eyes — those were Hawke’s eyes, looking out at him. “Varric,” she said, gently, “I dream of her. I dream of being her.”

“You said you didn’t remember,” he said, voice harsher than he’d meant.

“I don’t,” she said, flattening her hands on the counter and staring at them. “Hawke was left in the Fade, and there she remains. But when I sleep, when I walk in the Fade, there she is, waiting.”

He shook his head, suddenly dizzy, and Lee hurried around the counter to bring him to a seat. When she’d put him there, she knelt between his legs, putting them face to face. “I’m not Hawke,” she said. “I don’t think she wants to come back yet. But I know how important you were to her.”

Varric shook his head again. He could feel his face was twisted with distress, but he couldn’t smooth it out.

Lee cupped his face, hushing him, soothing him. It should have been invasive. He should have batted her hands away, or made his escape. No matter who she looked like, she was a stranger, she was — 

“What do you mean, _waiting_?” he demanded, grabbing her wrists and pulling her hands from his face.

She didn’t twist in his grasp, just gazed at him, calm. “Waiting, camped in the corpse of the Nightmare, or at Donnen Brennokovic’s bar, or at the burned out ruin of a hovel in Lothering. She’s so angry.” Lee glanced away from him then, her eyes unfocused. “I think she’s waiting to be less angry.”

“Do you talk?” Varric asked. It came out desperate and raw. “Is she…is she safe?”

Lee shrugged, looking back at him. “I don’t think she sees much point in talking to me. She misses you.”

“Here I am,” Varric said. “Waiting.”


	2. Chapter 2

When Varric got back to Isabela’s ship, he headed for the Captain’s quarters. He wished badly to be back in the Hanged Man, or the bar in Skyhold, or even his own office in the Viscount’s keep, where he kept a bottle of whiskey expensive enough to make Bran cry. Given how often Kirkwall brought him near tears, it seemed a fair trade to Varric.

Anyway, he needed, badly, to drink. When he made his way into Isabela’s room, he found he wasn’t the first. Bethany was sobbing into Isabela’s bosom, while Isabela stroked her hair soothingly. Fenris lounged in the window seat, looking for all the world like he’d gone deaf and blind to anything but the waves lapping below them.

“Shh, sweetling, shh,” Isabela said, “I know it’s hard. I know. I miss her too.”

Isabela’s bosom was possibly the best place Bethany could have picked to cry. Varric felt a little like joining her, but what right did he have? Bethany had lost her sister twice over. Varric, whatever Lee had thought, had only lost a friend. He went to the sideboard and poured himself a glass of one of Isabela’s finer rums and threw it back. Then he had another.

When the warmth started to spread through his stomach, he went to sit next to Isabela and Bethany and laid a hand on Bethany’s back. “Hey, Sunshine,” he said, and Bethany let out another choked sob.

“She doesn’t remember me,” Bethany said, forcing herself to sit and wiping her eyes. It did nothing to make her face less blotchy, but Varric just handed her a handkerchief. She blew her nose. “I thought...I thought even if she forgot everything else, she’d remember _me_ , and I know that was selfish, but I thought...I hoped...she said she was _sorry_.” 

Varric laughed mirthlessly. “Yeah, me too.”

Isabela patted Bethany’s thigh. “Don’t take it personally, sweetling, it’s not your fault.”

Bethany sniffed and put her Circle mage mask back on, a mild, calm expression that was undermined by the blotchiness of her face.

Fenris’ voice traveled across the cabin to them, a worrying distance in it. Varric would have to check in on him. “Strong emotions are what gave me some of my memories back.”

“He means fucking,” Isabela said. “You think one of us should fuck Hawke back to herself?” Before Fenris could respond, she continued. “I volunteer.”

“You know that’s not what I intended, but I doubt I can talk you out of it now,” Fenris said. 

“It would be impossible,” Isabela agreed. “Thought perhaps two would be more intense than one?”

“No,” Fenris said. “I’m leaving.”

Before he could escape, Varric called after him. “Whatever Anders was trying...it didn’t do anything, did it?”

Fenris’ lips tightened. “No.” He left without saying more.

Bethany stood, still scrubbing at her face. “She asked him not to try. Very prettily, but with no hesitation. And he didn’t. I wonder…”

“What?”

“If my sister had been more like Lee, would she have been able to keep Anders from destroying the Chantry?”

There was a long pause as Varric and Isabela considered the question. “I think,” Varric said eventually, “that is a question that will bring no joy, no matter the answer.”

“You’re right,” Bethany said. “And I shouldn’t have asked. I miss her more than anything, and I -- I never wished her different than she was.”

“I did,” Isabela said baldly. “I wished her less noble, less honor-bound, less concerned with every sob story that crossed our path. And now that I see her kind and selfish, I find I don’t care for it.”

“She’s happier,” Varric said, “and I shouldn’t begrudge her that, and yet here I am.”

“Well, shit,” Bethany said in a voice he was fairly certain was meant to mimic his own. “Never thought I’d be angrier at her for coming back than I was at her dying.”

“Hawke does have a way about her,” Isabela agreed.

“At least that’s the same,” Varric said. “As frustrating as ever.”

 

He didn’t seek her out after that, but neither did he avoid her, and Lee seemed as drawn to him as he’d been to Hawke. She found him at the prow of Isabela’s ship and leaned next to him at the rail. She looked fine with the sea wind whipping her hair, blue eyes squinted in the shine of sun on water. There was no rakish grin on her lips, and he’d never seen Hawke at sea anyway, so he decided to accept her as she was.

There was little else he could do.

“Will you stay much longer?” she asked.

“We haven’t discussed it,” he said, “but I can’t stay away from Kirkwall for long.”

“No,” she said, “of course not. I keep forgetting you’re the Viscount.” She cut a glance at him and smiled. “Just a normal sort of forgetting, don’t worry.”

They settled there in silence for a while before she said what was on her mind. “Bethany...Hawke was her only remaining family?”

“Yes.”

Lee stared at the waves. “It must be hard for her. I wish that I could be what she wants me to be.”

“Can’t you?” he asked. “Tell Hawke to come home.”

“Did you tell the rest of them?” she asked. “I think Isabela is trying to seduce me.”

“Isabela tries to seduce everybody,” he deflected. “No. I didn’t tell anyone.”

She licked her lips. “Thank you.”

“Why did you tell me?”

Lee shrugged. “It felt like the thing to do.”

“Will you ask her for me?” he asked. “When she thinks she’ll be ready?”

“I’ll ask. I don’t promise she’ll answer.”

He chuckled. “No one could ever promise on Hawke’s behalf.”

She cracked a grin at him. “I can see why she likes you so much.”

“I was her trusty dwarf,” he said, suddenly uncomfortable, more than he normally was around Lee.

“More than that, I think.” She turned to rest her back on the rail and tilted her head back, baring her throat to the sun. It was a relaxed gesture, of the kind he hadn’t seen Hawke make for years before she was lost in the Fade. It made something in him ache. “Will they ask me to come, when you all leave?”

“Oh, probably,” he said. “And I don’t think I could stop them, if that’s what you’re going to ask.”

“No,” she said slowly. “No, I think...I’ll have to think on it, but I would like to see Kirkwall.”

“Oh,” he said, surprised at how much he didn’t want to see Lee in Hawke’s home, in her streets. “Good.”

She glanced sidelong at him. “Are you always a bad liar, or did Hawke just know your tells?”

Varric snorted. “I’ll have you know I’m one of the best liars in the Free Marches, and that’s a title with some stiff competetion.”

“I don’t know that I believe you.”

He laughed. “It’s funny. If you tell people you’re a liar, they think you won’t lie to them.”

“Did you lie to Hawke?”

“No more than she lied to me.” He grinned at the confusion on Lee’s face. “We told each other some whoppers, each kept our secrets, but Hawke knew me better than anyone, and I knew her. We understood each other.”

“It sounds confusing,” Lee said.

“Not really. We always knew what the other meant.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Can I kiss you, Varric?”

“I think I misheard,” he said, tensing.

Lee smiled. “Liar. Can I kiss you? I can’t stop thinking about it. Did you ever kiss Hawke?”

“No,” he said. “To both.”

“Why not?” she asked. “Why didn’t you kiss Hawke, I mean. I can understand why you wouldn’t want to kiss me. I’m a stranger, after all.”

“We weren’t like that, I told you already.”

“She spoke to me last night,” Lee said, swinging away from the railing and beginning to pace. “Longer than she normally does. She wanted me to pass along a message. She wanted to tell Bethany that she still loves her, and she wanted me to tell you that becoming Viscount made you boring. I don’t think she meant that, though.”

“No,” he said, throat tight. “I don’t think so either.”

“You know what she meant, then?”

He did, and he didn’t want to talk about it with Lee, who was so close and so far from Hawke. “I think you should come back to Kirkwall,” he said instead. “If anything will bring back your memories, it’s the smell of the Gallows. That’s something a dead man could remember.”

“You’re deflecting,” she said.

“I am.”

“I’ll see you tomorrow, then,” she said, and left.

He watched her walk away, hips swaying with the gentle rocking of the ship. She still moved with Hawke’s grace. _Boring_ , he thought. So Lee was telling the truth. Hawke was still in there. All he needed to do was coax her out.

Which was easier said than done, but it was good to have any sort of a plan. He’d have to talk to Merrill. She might know Marethari’s ritual, how to send him into the Fade.

 

“Can you do it?”

Merrill twisted her hands together. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Can you try? The worst that can happen is you fail.”

“And then demons will come out,” she agreed. “Or possess you, or Lee, or me.”

“We’ve dealt with demons before,” he said soothingly. 

She looked dubiously at him. “And it’s always a mess. You hate demons, Varric, and you hated the Fade.”

“Hate is such a strong word, Daisy.”

“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. Would you prefer _loathing_ , or maybe _Don’t ever take me there again, Hawke, dwarves aren’t meant to go to the Fade_?”

“That was then, this is now. Things change, you know that.”

“Will you be angry if I use blood magic?” she asked.

“I absolutely will, do not use a demon to get me in the Fade.”

“Fine,” she said. “I can get it ready by tomorrow? I think?”

He kissed her forehead. “Thanks, Daisy. Let me know when it’s ready.”

He left her to her muttering and started looking for Fenris. Varric found him in the crow’s nest, and only made the climb after giving himself a bit of a pep-talk. The Inquisitor had taken him worse places, after all, he shouldn’t have any fear of heights left in his body. It wasn’t a hugely convincing talk, but it got him to put sweaty hands on rough rope and start the climb. He determinedly did not look down.

When he got to the top, Fenris glanced at him before looking back out to sea. If Varric squinted he could almost imagine he could see Kirkwall, or at least a smudge on the horizon.

“Didn’t know you were a fan of heights,” he said to Fenris, trying to keep his eyes glued on that horizon instead of the deck swaying below them.

“I’m a fan of solitude,” Fenris said pointedly.

“Ah, my mistake. I take it Isabela hasn’t talked you into an amnesiac threesome yet?”

“She has not,” Fenris said. 

For all that he’d meant to check in on Fenris, Varric found he hadn’t planned exactly how. “This must be quite an interesting diversion from piracy,” he said. 

“Interesting is not the word,” Fenris replied. “I am fine, dwarf. I will be better when we leave.”

“And if Lee decides to come?”

Fenris scowled. “I do not believe she will.”

 

“I’d like to see Hawke,” he said to Lee, leaning on the counter of her store.

She tilted her head at him, a gesture that still pinged him as _wrong_. “How do you plan to do that?”

“Elf magic,” he said, waving a hand. “The details are unimportant, and I don’t understand it myself. I just wanted your permission, first.”

“If you think it will help,” she said doubtfully.

“I don’t know about _help_ ,” he said, “but I do need to give her an earful for calling me boring.”

“Tonight, then?” she asked.

“Tomorrow. Daisy needs some time to get everything ready, and I don’t like to rush a mage.”

“Alright then, tomorrow.” She looked almost nervous.

Tomorrow didn’t come quickly. Varric struggled to sleep in his tiny cabin, feeling almost feverish with nerves. He hated the Fade, but he’d do anything to get Hawke back. It wasn’t Lee’s fault that she wasn’t Hawke, but Varric found himself incapable of feeling too bad about it. 

Begrudgingly, he acknowledged that there might have been some truth in what she said, that he loved Hawke. He wasn’t sure he would be this angry if any of the others lost their memories.

“That self-sacrificing idiot,” he said to the ceiling, giving up on sleep. He sat and lit a candle and started to write — letters to Hawke, a few fragments of sentences of _Hard in Hightown_ , even, to his embarrassment, a scrap of poetry he immediately burned.

By the time Merrill was ready for him, he was tired enough to fall asleep without the ritual. They did it in the back of the apothecary. Lee had a cot back there, and a comfortable chair. She perched on the edge of the cot until Merrill told her to lay back. “Otherwise you’ll tip over when you fall asleep, and I’d hate for you to hit your head,” Merrill fretted.

Varric took the chair and breathed deep. When he breathed out, he was in a bar. Behind the counter stood a man that looked like the way he’d always pictured Donnen Brennokovic, a strangeness he didn’t have the energy to question. At the other end sat Hawke.

“Hello, Varric,” she said, spinning a glass.

“Hawke,” he said, taking a seat next to her and putting a finger up to order what she was having. “I hear you think I got boring.”

“It’s not your fault,” she said generously. “We’ve spent too long apart. I knew that all of your interesting stories were about me, but I didn’t know that you’d go and get settled without me.”

“You think being Viscount is being settled? I’ve had three assassination attempts, you know.”

“That few? You must be doing something wrong.”

“Obviously. I need my Champion to come and drum up some more trouble for me.”

She stared at her drink, then threw it back. “I don’t know if I’m ready to come back yet.”

“Still angry?”

“Furious,” she said lightly. 

“You think you’re the only one?” he asked, turning to face her squarely. “I haven’t been less than that since the Inquisitor left you in the Fade.”

“To be fair, I begged her to do it.”

“And now I’ll beg you to come back out. I miss you, Hawke, and apparently I love you, so I don’t see that changing any time soon.”

She stared at him, blue eyes wide. They were brighter here, something he hadn’t thought possible.

“Lee — the one driving your body, in case you never caught her name — asked to kiss me, and I realized that the only one I wanted to be kissing was you.”

“Varric,” she said. “You’ll make me blush.”

“As long as you come back to your body to do it.”

“This feels like Isabela trying to get me to buy a dagger without trying it out first,” Hawke said lightly. “How do I know you’re worth all the indignities of life? Andraste’s ass, Varric, I haven’t had to smell rotten fish since I got here.”

“Bethany misses you.”

“That’s a low blow. I was just angling for a kiss.”

“What’s stopping you?”

She shrugged and snagged the drink maybe-Donnen set before him and swallowed it down before turning to him and crushing her mouth to his.

He opened his eyes to the room behind Lee’s shop and heard Lee — Hawke? — retchingacross the room.

“Oh dear,” Merrill said, patting her gingerly on the back as she leaned over the edge of the cot. “Are you alright, Lee?”

She grunted and wiped her mouth. “It’s me, Merrill, and I have the worst headache of my life. Be a dear and bring me some water?”

“Hawke?” Merrill said.

“Sure as shit,” Hawke said, and Varric got to his feet. 

Merrill squeezed her tight. “Oh, I missed you, Hawke. The world’s smaller without you.”

Hawke hugged her back. “Well, I got a bit lost on the way back.”

“I’ll go get the others,” Merrill said, and went for the door.

“And water!” Hawke called after her. “Maker, I feel like I’ve been in the Fade for three years.”

“Funny how that works,” Varric said, sitting next to her hip. 

She looked up at him with a softness that was Lee’s and a wicked glint that was all Hawke. “Think I could persuade you to write a sequel?”

“I don’t know, the market’s pretty saturated,” he said. “We’d need an interesting hook.”

“The Fade and amnesia aren’t interesting enough?” she asked, eyebrow raised.

“Eh, they might catch some attention, but will they keep it? It needs something more.”

“Like what?” she asked.

“Oh, I don’t know,” he said, taking her hand and lacing their fingers together. “Maybe a happy ending? That would shake things up a bit. Defy expectations.”

“I thought interesting stories didn’t have happy endings,” she said, squeezing his hand. “That’s what you told Anders, isn’t it? The audience loves a tragedy.”

“Hawke,” he said, his happiness in no way lessening his intensity. “Fuck the audience.”


End file.
